Q&A with Korbel professor and social entrepreneurship expert Janney Carpenter
Janney Carpenter is an adjunct faculty member at the Daniels College of Business, University College and the Korbel School of International Studies. At DU, she served as faculty director of the Barton Institute Social Enterprise Fellowship from 2017 to 2020. She helped design the social enterprise track in University College’s Nonprofit Leadership Program. As a community development consultant, she has engaged communities in problem-solving through market-based solutions internationally. She received her MBA from the University of Chicago in 1995.
Entrepreneurship@DU sat down with Carpenter to hear about her journey, and to learn what DU students should know about social enterprise and its scope beyond the world of business.
Q: How did you first get involved with social entrepreneurship?
A: It started when I transitioned from banking to community development consulting – both community and international development. Through that transition, I fell into microfinance work. I was really blown away by the caliber of these large microfinance institutions, especially in Bangladesh where I was working with BRAC and Grameen Bank. You had these local organizations and institutions who were constantly innovating and coming up with new ways to address the challenges of poverty. I learned so much from them through their entrepreneurial approaches to problem-solving, and how they were constantly developing their methods and improving their outcomes.
Local organizations play an important role in designing and implementing solutions, and proximity helps them stay close to customers and continue learning and adapting. Good social entrepreneurs gain a deep understood of complex problems and design market-based solutions to make things work better for their customers and beneficiaries, and they continue to learn and adapt over time. I gained huge respect for the role of the social entrepreneur to see possibilities, test ideas and lead collaboratively.
There are great organizations with visionary leaders and a great culture that are focused on social good – they use many of the same entrepreneurial skills and mindsets as for-profit entrepreneurs to achieve their social purpose mission.
Q: How do microfinance and social enterprise address the problems of the day?
A: While my consulting work started in microfinance and small business development, it evolved into social enterprise strategy and helping nonprofit and for-profit social enterprises and funders achieve their goals. While social enterprises don’t fit every problem, I believe in market-based solutions for social good and public benefit.
Whether they are nonprofit or for-profit, social enterprises are organizations that are community-centered and customer-focused, and engage resources and partners from diverse sources to fill market gaps. There are market gaps in access to opportunity everywhere – the gaps tend to be bigger in international development, but we have them in the U.S., too. Local businesses and NGOs provide goods and services, create jobs and build wealth in communities. This has been a big anchor point in my work. It’s so important to have local institutions get involved in local problems, because they have the proximity and the understanding of communities and people.
I’m a big believer in market-based solutions. You have to be providing value to customers, building on market forces or close market gaps, rather than working against them. That is one of the reasons I like social enterprise–these organizations use a business-oriented approach to solve the problems of the day.
Q: How did your work bring you to the University of Denver?
A: It was actually my husband’s work that brought us back to Denver. I was living in Chicago working for ShoreBank Corporation where I had transitioned into development consulting. I was traveling a lot, even overseas on a regular basis. In Chicago, I was teaching in the Public Nonprofit Management program at the Kellogg School of Business. It was all about different development finance strategies. I was actually still teaching at Kellogg from Denver, but then I was asked to be a guest speaker for a microfinance class at DU and eventually started teaching the class. Based on student interest, that microfinance class has expanded into managing social enterprises and social entrepreneurship.
While I love working as a consultant, I really love teaching and working with students from all over the University because I am always learning and love helping students explore the problems and solutions they care about. I want to help them develop the entrepreneurial mindset and strategies to help them solve the problems they are passionate about.
Q: How can students use entrepreneurship beyond the scope of for-profit business?
A: Social entrepreneurship is about finding new ways to solve problems, to make things work better. While social entrepreneurs need the same skills as other entrepreneurs, they must also understand the problems they want to address, find ways to measure impact, and provide value to multiple stakeholders. They are always learning and building collaboration across sectors, since most “wicked problems” don’t neatly fit into one space or discipline.
Not everyone becomes an entrepreneur, but we need entrepreneurial thinkers in nonprofits, in funders and investors, in business, and in all disciplines because social and environmental challenges are multi-disciplinary and complex. I believe an “entrepreneurial mindset” helps us see opportunities to make things work better, help organizations listen and learn from customers and users, and leads to both local outcomes and market-level change.
In my classes, I explore the shared characteristics of organizations and leaders who do this well and give students some strategies and tools to develop their own entrepreneurial mindsets. I try to give them useful ways to approach problems, strategies to address them, and inspiration though great guest speakers from the community.